Neil young BTW just said music won¹t change the world a few days ago.
Bill placing a seed order in a day.
You mean like regime change in Hawaii, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Panama, Iran, and Hati, and the Congo. Attempted regime change in Cuba (300+ acknowledged assassination attempts on Fidel). Attempted regime change in Venezuela, where we nearly got Chavezed killed. Support for South Africa (we told them where to find Mandela). Military support for Indonesia during the bloody repression of East Timore. And of coure the ever popular aiding and abetting in the theft of Palestinian land and subsequent efforts at ethnic cleansing (see video of "Death in Gaza" if you haven't already). Then there is the matter of the aftermath of the Watergate break ins which lead to the "Church Committee"(1975), referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, and the Rockefeller Commission (1975), a.k.a. U.S. President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States which chronicled the use of the CIA and the Mafia to assassinate world leaders and and to discredit anti-war and civil rights leaders in the United States. All of whose good works have been undone by the so-called "Patriot Act". The set piece of bigotry, brutishness, ignorance, and greed that has for so long been a given in American political life is alive and well.
Hell, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers were barely sufficient.
From what I'm reading in "Collapse" by Jarod Diamond, most societies that have failed, started with deforestation. So good on you Bill. I'm also becoming convinced that planting a garden is a revolutionary act.
Viva Fidel
I read Diamond's book titled "Germs Steel etc" it's been a while.
Anyway since you like pop corn.
PS All I want for Christmas is A Hoag Kilt go figure.
I preferred "Guns, Germs, & Steel" but "Collapse" is a good book too but I have to pick up my pace with it. "Imperial life in the emerald city : inside Iraq's green zone" is waiting for me at the library. Have you already read "In Defense of Food"? If so, how do you compare it to "Omnivore"? A month after requesting it, I've dropped down to #93 in the queue. I might see it by early May.
Was it you who posted the URL for "The Dumbing Of America" by Susan Jacoby? Imagine my surprise to turn on the radio, while making breakfast, and having her interviewed on the local station. Another good read, thanks.
Magor export are Doctor's.
No need to read In "Defense of Food" unless you want a review. I need reviews.
Nope.
Currently TRYING to read the "Rest is noise". Music history with charm and human frivolities.
But...Beware you may end up purchasing things you never heard of ;)).
Bill
This realism is like an x-ray machine, it needs to be taken in small doses, otherwise it can fry the brain. I just finished watching "Osama", a Pashtun film. It makes "Death in Gaza" seem like a musical comedy. I got to get the bad taste out of mouth before I watch anything like that again. Oh, for anyone reading the post, it isn't bin Laden.
In a lighter vein, a Hoag Kilt? Hope you have the legs for it. Not to mention a sharp wintery breeze could freeze your knickers and anything else in that general vicinity. Except for the connection to the Scottish film "Culloden". I don't see the connection. Might there be a site where I could feast my eyes on a handsome Hoad plaid?
When I think of Scotland, I think of Scotch and John Knox. With any luck at all the former will wash away the memory of the latter. I hope that Scottish pubs are as welcoming as Irish pubs, where a man can go and drink, and become bellicose, lachrymose, and comatose of an evening.
'ere's mud in your eye.
And soldiers. When Cuban-Americans and Americans chided Nelson Mandela for his support of Fidel, he upbraided them by asking where in the hell they were when he needed help, Fidel sent soldiers and doctors.
Arrg. The curse of late night impulsive internet shopping:-(
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction
-- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between
1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and
24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
snipped-for-privacy@susanjacoby.com
And when I saw America you know it blew my mind
Thanks to Charlie.
New York 1963 - America 1968 18:49 Eric Burdon & The Animals
Every One Of Us Rock 100
Wonder what we deserve.
Bill
I sure hope that they remembered that he was wedged under the log, out in the yard. It's been gettin' cool at night, up there along the Iowa border.
Better, much better;-)
Ahhh, indeed....'tis comforting that someone remembers poor old Charlie, mouldering under the log, suffering in his "self-imposed" exile. As the mood came upon me, I needed to abandon the party for a while. Much to the chagrin of many of youse, said exile *may* be coming to it's usual, temporary end. Cycles of life.
Such is life.
Cool doesn't quite do justice to what lies under the log here, Billy! It is effing cold here, and this is really unusual for mid Feb round these here parts, for this long a period. 2F right now as I return from viewing the eclipse. And it looks to continue for a spell. (pssssssst, can you say climate change).
Lots of thinking was done this winter, mostly not of the "uplifting" sort. Working thru life and possible futures, yet *trying* to remain grounded in, and aware of, the immediate moment. Whew.
"If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst." ~Thomas Hardy
Lots of truth there and wisdom to be gained from adopting that viewpoint, my friend.
Trying to catch up on some long neglected literary work, freely available from the Gutenberg Project, but am having some vision difficulties due to vitreous hemorrhage in my spare eyeball, though it is slowly resolving and improving, due in part to a self-developed herbal and nutritional program and in part to time. Spent the better part of several months sober, with the help of one particular herb, believe it or not. Said herb also aids in moderation, as I am not willing to give up my breakfast barleywine. All this will no doubt lead to further discussions of herbal efficacy related to BP and various other ailments that plague mankind (I dropped BP from 195/125 to 145/85 and eliminated pain from Arthur in a couple months with herbs alone. P***ing like a horse, I am.)
Lots of gardening ideas in me addled pate. The ice storm we had before Xmas eliminated the large tree in the patio area, so the area will be converted to edible landscaping. Will be fun and a good exercise in containers and small raised beds and support systems.
I see OtherBill has re-invented his name. Greetings to ya' again, otherBill W. I have lots of new/old music......it was a great comfort during the really dim vision times.
At any rate, I'm checking out opening the blinds again and seeing what is happening "out there".
Watch yer back, old man........I must assume you are keeping abreast of current events! ;-)
Care Charlie
Old man! Smarty pants wippersnapper, I oughtln' be bending you over my knee and givin' you a damn good hiding. Hurummph.
I been keepin' an eye on you boy, just glad you ain't froze your kester off. Looks damn cold from where I sit. Thank god the rain is here. I was running out of firewood.
Anyway, you been under that log long enough. Time to give some other poor critter a chance to hunker down. Glad you showed up. The regulars are startin' to go at each other again. What they really need is some fresh meat to claw at.
Nice to have you back.
In alt.fifty-plus.friends saw this and thought of you folks.
Bill
Perhaps music can change things.
.........................
Worth a look Video. Might not be about for long.
Bill
...................
Thanks for the heads up Bill. Although, the video was too tame for my taste, I am amazed that it made it on to corporate television.
You might want to look for "The Power of Nightmares". It was first screened on BBC Two in Autumn 2004 as a series of three one hour documentaries questioning whether the threat of terrorism to the West is a politically driven fantasy and if al-Qaeda really is an organised network. I've heard some audio out-takes and it sounds pretty good.
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